eastlondonhistory.com

THE death of reclusive film-maker Stanley Kubrick earlier this month resurrected one of the unlikeliest stories, even in a business where nothing is quite what it seems.
For the last years of his
life, the Hollywood director refused to set foot out of England – so it was that the apocalyptic battle scenes in Full Metal Jacket were shot on the blasted no-man’s land of the Royal Docks at Beckton.
But it was only one of the most recent appearances of East London in the movies. Since the cameras started rolling 100 years ago, the East End has been the set, star and subject matter of countless films – both fiction and documentary, comedy and drama.
Tower Hamlets first starred in the newsreels – the documentaries that used to accompany feature films at the cinema. One of its earliest appearances was in The Great East End Anarchists Battle, a dimly-lit newsreel of the 1911 Sidney Street Siege. Run in the movie theatres of the time, it propagated the myth that the East End was wild and dangerous, peopled by foreigners and revolutionaries.
In fact, Tower Hamlets was always fertile ground for documentary makers. The Peaceful Years (1948) was a broad-
ranging look at London in the 30 years between the wars, featuring footage of a smiling Oswald Mosley as he prepared to address thousands of his Blackshirts at a Whitechapel meeting in 1935.
Much of the early footage was naïve by today’s standards. Often, the cameraman would simply point his machine and log what he saw – giving us films like Hoxton… Saturday July 3rd (1920). Not much explanation needed there, but it gives a modern viewer a
fascinating slice of street life of the time.
Of course, that life – and the streets – were soon to change. A series of Government documentaries chart the problems and redevelopment of the slum-blighted East End. Housing Problems (1935) and London Can Take It (1940) chart an East End in decay and being rebuilt after the destruction of the Blitz. And Homes For All (1947) provides a nostalgic view of the prefabs that once peppered the bombed-out Tower Hamlets.
It wasn’t till the socially realistic films of the 1950s and 1960s that the East End made a real entrance in feature films. Carry On star Barbara Windsor starred as a dissatisfied Bethnal Green housewife in the 1962 movie Sparrows Can’t Sing. The film was shot around Cambridge Heath Road, and in a strange twist of fact and fiction, Ronnie and Reggie Kray were hired to provide security on the film set. A quarter of a century later, the Krays’ own East End story would be immortalised in The Krays, starring Gary and Martin Kemp of pop group Spandau Ballet. Martin can now be
seen in EastEnders with one Barbara Windsor.
With its moody and dramatic wharfs, warehouses and waterways, Docklands always made a great set for gangster movies, even if some of the older features, like Pool of London (1950) were corny takes on a Hollywood theme. One of the delights of that movie, though, were the interior shots of the Queen’s Theatre in Poplar, and the chase scenes in a starkly-lit Wapping.
The decline and rebirth of Docklands was charted in
1979 gangster movie The Long Good Friday, starring Bob Hoskins as a psychopathic gang boss whose dream was the rebirth of the redundant docks as a bustling new city. Twenty years on, and fact
at last seems to be copying
film fiction.

TALK about British comedy and there is a name that stands head and shoulders above the competition. The Carry On series ran for 30 years – from the gentle post-War approach of Carry On Sergeant to the ironic alternative comedy of Carry On Columbus.
The films are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank.*
And for East Enders, the films have a special resonance – Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor are just two locals who went on to star in the series, and they have been celebrated in East End History in the past. But the Cockney connection goes far deeper – for the man who penned those first few Carry Ons was a Tower Hamlets boy.
Norman Hudis was born in Stepney in 1923. He always had a sharp mind and a gift for words and, on leaving school, he landed a job as a local newspaper reporter, working on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
War came, and Norman served with the RAF in the Middle East, turning his hand to writing for Air Force News. And like so many of the entertainers who came to dominate British comedy in the ’50s – such as Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and the Goons – he sharpened his comedy pen writing for the concert parties and camp concerts organised as a tonic for the troops.
It was tougher in Civvy Street however. Back in London after the War, Norman decided to throw in journalism and try his hand as a playwright. He was certainly prolific, but not successful. However one of his works, Here is the News, got good reviews.
These caught the eye of the producers at Pinewood. At the time, south-east England had a thriving film industry, at Pinewood, Ealing and Shepperton, and the money men were always on the lookout for young talent to turn out the features needed to fill Britain’s bustling cinemas.
It was production line stuff – many of the films were destined to be ‘B’ features to the big American movies. But after two years at Shepperton, and with not one film produced, Norman was fed up, and decided to go freelance.

His years of apprenticeship paid off, and he was soon churning out successful scripts. The quality was sometimes iffy, not surprising as at one point Norman was working on three scripts at once!
Fortune took a lucky turn when he bumped into Peter Rogers in 1957. Rogers was already an established producer on the UK film scene, he went on to make more than 100 movies, and he was working on a biopic of the rock and roll singer Tommy Steele. Norman was offered the job of scripting Rock Around the World.
The film was a hit, and Norman was immediately drafted in to pen a swift follow-up, after all, no-one knew how long the singing ex-seaman’s chart career would last! But The Duke Wore Jeans was another success for the pair, this time with director Gerald Thomas on board.
Rogers and Thomas were working together on a production of RF Delderfield’s novel The Bull Boys, and called in the reliable Hudis to rewrite the book for the screen. Dumping the original title as too flat, they selected one of the final lines from the film as a name. And “Carry on Sergeant” was a massive hit.
Norman went on to pen five more Carry Ons. Carry On Nurse was the top-grossing UK film of 1959. Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising followed, one a year, each charting the battles of a crew of bunglers who come through against all the odds.
But by 1962, the team felt the formula was wearing thin. Hudis was replaced by Talbot Rothwell, who took the films in a bawdier and more farcical direction.
The Stepney writer took off for pastures newer and more lucrative. Throughout the ’60s he worked on TV and film in California, eventually moving there full time in the seventies. Episodes of CHiPs, The Wild Wild West, Marcus Welby MD, The Man From Uncle and Buck Rogers are just a few to have flowed from his typewriter.
But of all his writing, the Carry Ons remain closest to his heart. Back in London recently for the 40 Years of Carry On celebrations, he remarked that it was his core of irreverent, risque East End humour that made those comedies. Best of all, 40 years on, people are still laughing!

When Lord Grade died just before Christmas, it was more than just the passing of a larger than life figure on the UK entertainment scene.
It marked the demise of the last great impresario to make the leap from music hall to TV and films.
And Lew was also the last great link with the old Jewish East End – the East End of working class lads who transformed themselves through hard work and an eye for the chance into the great entrepreneurs of post-War London.
Louis Winogradsky was born in the Ukrainian town of Tokmak on Christmas Day 1906, to parents Olga and Isaac. But in 1912, along with thousands of other Jewish families, the family fled the pogroms in the Tsar’s empire to a new life in the East End.
It was an uncertain existence. Within the first months, Isaac had lost all the capital he had brought with him. The Winogradsky boys, however, were adapting to London life a little better.
Louis and little brothers Leslie and Bernard (later the theatrical impresario Lord Del- font) excelled at the Rochelle Street School in Shoreditch, and Louis was soon coming top of the class in maths.
But showbiz seemed to be in the blood and, while Isaac was making a fresh start managing a cinema in Soho’s Brewer Street (Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar today), young Lou was skipping Saturday morning synagogue to go to the pictures.
He didn’t find his niche straight away. First he decided to put his maths nous to use as an accountant, then at 15 became an agent for a rag trade firm. The budding entrepreneur soon set up his own firm with his dad, turning out clothes 24-hours a day.
Fred’s favourite
But his energy wasn’t confined to work. He loved to go dancing at the East Ham Palais. And in 1926, “Louis Grad” was crowned World Solo Charleston Champion at the Albert Hall. The judge? No less than Fred Astaire.
Lew was hooked and sold up the firm to become a professional dancer, “the man with the musical feet”.

By now he was “Lew Grade”, after his name was misspelt on a bill, but by the 1930s knee problems – and the fact that the Charleston had had its day – prompted him to move into management.
He first worked for the agent Joe Collins, Joan and Jackie’s dad. Then, after returning from a wartime stint in the Army, set up with his brother Leslie. As a minnow in a hard business, Lou had to fight for his share, and he went over to the States to snatch up-and-coming acts, bringing Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Jack Benny to London.
The biggest agent in Britain now moved into fledgling commercial TV. The Midlands franchise (ATV, now Central) was a flop at first. But Lou knew what sold, and Crossroads, Emergency Ward 10, General Hospital and the Muppets made the station one of the giants, along with Granada and Thames.
Titanic flop
Films beckoned too with successes like the Pink Panther series and On Golden Pond. And Lew got there nearly 20 years before James Cameron and Leonardo Di Caprio. Unfortunately though, his 1980 production Raise The Titanic was such a flop that he remarked that “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!”
Joking apart, the financial disaster nearly sunk Grade’s company ACC, and it signalled the beginning of the end of his one-man operation.
But even when he’d loosened the reins at ACC, Lew just couldn’t stop working – finding new talent and setting up deals well into his nineties. Even the energetic Grade couldn’t finish one of his projects though – he had bought 450 of Barbara Cartland’s books with the aim of making films of them.
One of the big men of the entertainment industry, he’ll always be remembered for his chutzpah and big cigar.
Louis Winogradsky died Baron Grade of Elstree, just days short of his 92nd birthday, which would have fallen on Christmas Day.

You may know him as the suavely evil gangland boss Victor Maitland, who torments Eddie Murphy in the 1980s smash movie Beverly Hills Cop. Or the villainous Russian General Orlov, Roger Moore’s adversary in Octopussy.
You may know him better for his own plays, drawing deep on his childhood and teenage memories of East End life, to write and produce East and West. Or maybe as the producer and director of 30-odd years of pedigree avant-garde theatre, adapting and bringing new life to the plays and books of literary heavies like Kafka, with The Trial and Metamorphosis.
Steven Berkoff is a tough talent to pin down – which is probably just how he’d want it – but his road to becoming an international movie star and successful producer and director starts back in the 1930s enclave of East End Jewish immigrants, and an endless succession of dead-end jobs.
Berkoff was born in Stepney in 1937. Berkoff’s father Abraham (Al) ran a tailor’s shop in Leman Street, from which the talented cutter would turn out lavishly-made zoot suits for the West Indians who were already settling in London.
He also catered for East End boxers who were making a name for themselves – Jewish fighters like Ted Kid Lewis and Kid Berg, both world champions.
After the war, the Berkoffs returned to the East End following an ill-fated attempt to settle in the US. Home now was two rooms and an outside loo in Anthony Street, off the Commercial Road.
With chickens in the back yard, it was a far cry from the glamour of New York, but there was plenty to entertain the young Steven.
The Troxy Cinema in Poplar was the local venue for Saturday morning films, and there was the Palaseum at the end of the road for the Sunday afternoon film.
Steven was enrolled at Raine’s Foundation in Arbour Square – a first-rate school – where he was a near-contemporary of fellow playwright Harold Pinter.
And his physical welfare was taken care of by regular dips in the lido at Victoria Park in summer, and at Betts Street Baths, off Cable Street, in the winter.

The East End was a fascinating playground, and the young Berkoff would spend hours in Petticoat Lane market, transfixed by the wares at the stamp collectors’ corner and examining the animals in the now-defunct Club Row livestock market for signs of ill-treatment.
It was a world Berkoff would dip into time and again in his later work.
After a succession of aimless jobs in the fabric and garment trades, miserable stints in West End clothes shops, and a spell working in the US Army PX’s in Germany, Berkoff studied drama in London and Paris.
He worked in rep, appearing on TV in 1960s favourites like The Avengers, before forming his own company, the London Theatre Group, in 1968.
Drawing on his East End memories, Berkoff penned his first original stage play, East, first presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975.
West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch, Acapulco, Harry’s Christmas, Lunch, Sink the Belgrano, Massage, Sturm und Drang and Brighton Beach Scumbags followed from the writer’s prolific pen.
Meanwhile, the energetic Berkoff was mounting plays and adaptations in Japan, Germany and Los Angeles – Richard II and Coriolanus for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and touring with his one-man show in Britain, the US, South Africa, Finland, Italy, Singapore and Australia.
But to many he was better known for his film portrayals of sinister heavies, revisiting the East End for his role as murder victim George Cornell in the film of The Krays.
And, at 61, the former East End boy is still busy, with his new book of short stories, Graft, now in the shops, and a run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Shakespeare’s Villains.
Graft – Tales of an Actor,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN:1 84002 040 7, £12.
Free Association:
An Autobiography,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN: 0 571 19629 6, £7.99.

Antiques dealer, best-selling author, playwright, screenwriter and entrepreneur – Wolf Mankewitz, who has died aged 73, was a man of many parts.
But his twin loves – of literature and turning a profit on a deal – were forged in his childhood memories of his dad selling books from a barrow in Brick Lane.
In the 1950s and 60s, Mankewitz would gain fame and fortune as the writer of the hit musical Expresso Bongo, the best-selling novel Make Me An Offer and the science fiction thriller movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire. But as a boy, money was always hard to come by.
His parents were Russian Jews, just one couple out of the thousands of immigrants who poured into Whitechapel in the late 1800s and early 20th century, escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
Like many others, his dad struggled to make a living. But what he did have was industry and the thing he knew well was books. And it was a book on his father’s stall that persuaded a young Wolf where his destiny lay. He picked up a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and was hooked – he decided to be a writer.
His parents were determined their son should get the chances they had not had. And when Wolf won a scholarship to Cambridge University his father sold all the stock from his barrow to pay his way.
The £90 allowed Wolf to take up his course. But seeing the sacrifices his parents had to make made him determined never to suffer such privations again. For the rest of his life he would combine the vocation of writer with a buying-and-selling dealer’s brain that owed a lot to his father’s example.

Graduating from Cambridge at the precociously early age of 19, his first move was to set himself up as an antiques dealer. It quickly made him a good living, especially as he could combine it with his love of writing.
His expert knowledge of Wedgewood china allowed him to pen the book Wedgewood, an informed guide to judging and buying pieces.
But as the 1950s drew on, Wolf was to find fame not as a dealer, but as a successful writer. The best authors always write about what they know, they say, and he next turned to a fictionalised account of the antiques trade.
The very title of Make Me An Offer paints a picture of the deal-making stall traders Mankewitz would have been surrounded by as a boy, and it described the wrinkles, tricks and occasional dodgy dealings of the trade.
Writing of his roots
Many cinemagoers of the time will remember the movie of his hit story A Kid For Two Farthings, a poignant tale of a lad who is conned into buying a one-horned goat on the pretext that it is a unicorn.
And The Bespoke Overcoat again drew on his roots, telling the tale of an East End Jewish tailor.
He found notoriety, too, disrupting an edition of famed 1960s satire programme That Was The Week That Was with a verbal attack on critic Bernard Levin, who had had the temerity to attack his work. Mankewitz hammered home his point by having a tiny coffin – tailormade for the diminutive critic – delivered to his Daily Express office.
It was a colourful life – toward the end of it he became the honorary Panamian Consul to Dublin!
But as far as he travelled, his hallmark was always the eye for a deal, a razor sharp eye developed at his street trader dad’s barrow in the Whitechapel of the 1920s and 30s.

Many readers will know that the battle scenes for Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket were shot not in war-torn Vietnam, but just down the road from Tower Hamlets, in Beckton.
But east London’s connection with Vietnam-inspired Hollywood movies does not end with Stanley Kubrick’s bloody epic.
For the greatest of them all, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, was born in the reminiscences and romance of an exiled Eastern European writer – as he gazed on the misty River Thames from his adopted East End home.
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in Berdichev, in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
His parents, Apollo and Evelina, were fierce Polish patriots and were swiftly exiled by the autocratic Tsarist regime.
It was the first step in a journey that would take the young Jozef halfway round the world, before he settled in Whitechapel.
His parents died in exile, leaving the child Jozef an orphan. His uncle Thaddeus adopted the boy and, in 1874, conceded to his burning desire to go to sea. Jozef set off for Marseilles in search of a ship.
Journeys round the world followed until, in 1878, Jozef joined a British merchantman, winning his Master’s certificate.
Name change
He got on well with his shipmates, quickly rising through the ranks. But Jozef’s one problem was his name which, try as they might, the English-men just could not master.
In frustration at hearing their tortuous attempts, Jozef decided if you can’t beat them, join them, and changed his name to the more manageable Joseph Conrad.
Suitably Anglicised, he decided to make his home in England. The East End was already a second home to him – he made his first stay at the Sailors’ Home and Red Ensign Club in Whitechapel, while serving on the Duke of Sutherland.
While he was on his long voyages, Conrad would while away the time by writing stories and, in 1885, he had his first success, when The Black Mate was published in Titbits magazine.

In 1894, Conrad left the service, deciding to concentrate on writing. But his passion for the sea permeates his books.
His journeys in and out of the Pool of London inspired the memorable opening scenes of Heart of Darkness which, almost a century later, Coppola would update and transform into Apocalypse Now.
The book evokes a lost East End of bustling docks, sailors’ flophouses and schooners waiting for the next high tide and fair wind. And the story unfolds from the cold, misty and lonely Thames Estuary to the final horror in the heart of Africa.
Many more novels followed – ironically, Conrad came to be one of the greatest novelists in the English language, some achievement as it was his third tongue, after Russian and Polish.
His was a colourful life but also one touched by tragedy. In 1878, in one of his sporadic bouts of depression, Conrad shot himself but survived. In 1904, his wife became an invalid and his son Borys, often sick in childhood, was gassed in the trenches in France.
But by the early 1920s, Conrad was a celebrated English- man of letters. So English in fact that in 1924 he was offered a knighthood – the naturalised Briton declined the honour.
In the same year Jacob Epstein, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century completed Conrad’s bust. It was to be the final memento of the Polish East Ender. On 3 August that year, he died of a heart attack.

When Sir David Lean died in 1991, he left behind a huge home in Wapping and a reputation as a maker of some of the world’s most famous films.
Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Bridge Over The River Kwai were all big-budget, star-laden epics, and huge hits at the box office.
But it was a far cry from Lean’s humble beginnings in the business – and if it had been down to his devoutly religious parents, the most successful director the British industry has ever seen would never have got on the set.
The Croydon couple were strict Quakers who forbade the young David to go to the sinful cinema. He would sneak off from school to watch movies and dreamed of a career in films.
After throwing in a accountancy job, he became a clapper boy at Gainsborough studios. He swiftly moved to the editor’s chair, cutting documentaries and production line B-movies.
Noel Coward was at Gainsborough directing his first film and, with his keen eye for young talent, co-opted Lean to co-direct.
It couldn’t have gone better. In Which We Serve was a massive wartime hit, striking all the right notes with a patriotic British public. Coward was a film and stage star, and Lean was a winning director.
A string of hits ensued. Brief Encounter, starring Celia John-son and Trevor Howard, the Coward-scripted Blithe Spirit and This Happy Breed, followed by Great Expectations.
In the Fifties, Lean continued his dual path – the romantic themes of The Passionate Friends and Summer Madness and the patriotic harking back to the war years in the Bridge Over The River Kwai and the Sound Barrier.
Lean’s huge hits of the Sixties relied as much on great writing as tight direction.
Doctor Zhivago, shot in Spain and Finland, breathtakingly evoked the huge open spaces of the Russian Steppes, lasted nearly three and a half hours, cost a fortune and was the biggest hit of the mid-Sixties. It also boasted the heavyweight talents of novelist Boris Pasternak and screenwriter Robert Bolt.

But perhaps the movie which will stand as Lean’s masterwork was one made three years before and which, at 226 minutes, dwarfs even Zhivago.
Lawrence of Arabia, staring Peter O’Toole as the British colonel leading an Arab revolt, broke the mould.
“Traditional movie storytelling raised to its highest form,” raved one critic.
The audiences agreed and the film won seven Oscars, including best picture, best director, photography and score.
Ryan’s Daughter, in 1970, didn’t strike gold with the critics and the fans stayed away. Lean found himself out of fashion and it was difficult for him to finance the blockbusters which had been his trademark. He didn’t make another film for 14 years.
When he did, it was a triumphant return. A Passage to India in 1984 saw him writing as well as directing. It won five Oscar nominations, with Dame Peggy Ashcroft winning best supporting actress in her last film.
Lean was working on a film of Nostromo when he died – an adaptation of the novel by Joseph Conrad, who had made his home in Whitechapel a century before.
Who knows what that union of East End minds might have produced?